Good evening. And welcome to everyone who’s joining us on the
Internet.

We’ve been talking about the purpose of the body and the use to
which you put it, and the fact that when those two things are out of
sync, you have problems. The body is a means, not an end. It is a means
of communication. And the only worthy communication that you can engage
in is the acknowledgement in another, or in a thing, of That Which Is
Divine about them; the acknowledgement of What They Truly Are; the
recognition of God right there. The purpose of the body is to be the
means by which the communication of such acknowledgement occurs.

Now let’s talk for a moment about body as an end. You might not
think I’m aware of things like this, but if you walk into any
department store into the kitchen section these days, you will find
toasters that are styled in a 1930’s and 1940’s theme. Now
you tell me what the style of the appearance of a toaster has to do with
browning bread so that you can enjoy it with your eggs and bacon in the
morning? [laughing] It serves a purpose of being an end in
itself—a decoration in your kitchen. And, of course, if
you’re one of the first ones to have it, wow, you can be proud of
being up-to-date in a modern kitchen—which is really ridiculous
because it’s a design from the 1930’s! I mean, you see the
senselessness of it? When a toaster becomes a fixture in your kitchen so
that it (the kitchen) has a pleasing appearance, and even makes some
statement about you [sparse scattered audience laughs], it’s lost
its purpose, hasn’t it? It has become an end in itself. And, at
the bottom line, the purpose of it having an end is to make a statement
about you. This is always what using a thing as an end means.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that there’s really only one
Function, or one Purpose, for Vision, for seeing. It’s much the
same as the function of the body, in that the Purpose of Vision is to
allow you to be able to acknowledge That Which Is Real in whatever
you’re looking at. In other words, the Purpose of Vision is to
give something.

But I’ve mentioned before that you generally use vision to get, to
gather data, to know if you’re safe, to know how to behave under
the circumstances. And when you’re doing that, you’re not
making the Gift. When you’re doing that, you are involved in
self-consciousness—not
other-consciousness—self-consciousness. And the only reason any of
you ever engage in self-consciousness is for self-protection, which
means that you have identified yourself as body, rather than
Consciousness/Mind. Whenever you are not identifying yourself as
Consciousness, giving your attention to making the Gift of acknowledging
the Truth of everything you’re seeing, you’re engaged in
self-defense. You are identified as a body. Your body has become an
object that you call you. And you’re like the toaster that has
some other purpose than browning bread. You’ve lost your purpose.

You see, we’ve used the phrase “using the body as a means or
an end,” and you might not have quite understood practically what
that meant. But when you are self-conscious and you are using vision to
get, you have shifted to using the body as an end. How is that? When you
are gathering data to find out whether you’re safe or not, you try
to do this data-gathering skillfully and unnoticed. Right? I mean, you
don’t really want everybody to know that you don’t trust
them.

And so, you use your body to distract them by making a presentation that
has a certain effect. One of the ways you do it is that you dress nicely
to make a good impression. You don’t walk in with guns on your
hips, and bullets across your chest, and a knife in your hand. You walk
in looking as benign as possible, with as much elegance as is
appropriate under the circumstances. You don’t want to look like a
slob, because you want to appear to be credible, decent, respectable.
Right? But still, you use your body to make an impression. That’s
not a Gift because it’s selfish. You’re protecting yourself
while you engage in surreptitiously gathering information.

You roll over in bed in the morning and turn to your wife, or husband,
and in a soft voice you say, “Did you sleep well?” You see?
Benign. [laughing] What you’re really asking is [laughing],
“Is it safe for me to get up out of bed without being on
guard?” You see? But you have a presentation. And this act of
apparent caring is totally selfish. Why? Because you think that you may
be in danger, that you may be confronted by somebody who’s still
mad at you for what happened last night. You see? That’s what is
characteristic of self-consciousness.

Now, I want to shift here. Creation is an UN-self-conscious, exuberant,
joyful, spontaneous Expression of Being. If something happens that
tickles your funny-bone and causes you to burst out laughing, you
suddenly move into a state of total un-self-consciousness. And if you
want to find out what happened, how you behaved, you would have to go
back to a videotape; some sort of picture that you could watch. You
would have to find out what you were being after the fact, because you
were in a state of un-self-conscious self-expression. In other words,
the impression you were making, or how you looked, was the furthest
thing from your mind.

God doesn’t BE FOR anyone else. Creation is not a movement to
impress. Creation is not a movement to create an impression. It is a
spontaneous Movement of exquisite perfection, because as we’ve
been talking about, God is a Singularity. Creation is that singularity
rendered visible, recognizable, experienceable to the Mind that moved
that was the Act of Creation.

When you are using your body properly, you’re not self-conscious.
You’re not into any level of conscious awareness of what kind of
an impression you’re making. You are engaged in the on-the-spot
recognition of the Presence of God moving in whatever you’re
looking at, whether it’s a Brother, or a Sister, or a plant, or a
table, or a leaf, or a fingernail. It’s a pure Gift without
strings. And you know what? You can bring that Purity of Being, you can
bring that Conscious Experience Of Being into any and every aspect of
your day. It’s not a holy, or spiritual, or religious thing to be
relegated to a synagogue, or a church, or a temple.

So we will continue. But at least now you have a better understanding of
how it is that you can slip into using your body as an end, rather than
a means.

Your habit, your persistence of perception would hold your body as
something separate from you; something not you that you inhabit for a
period of time, and then abandon. Or it abandons you, it would seem. But
this is not the Truth. It is the Visibility and Tangibility of your
Individuality which is God presencing Himself right where you are. And
your body must be brought back into your recognition of your Self, just
as the world must be brought back into your recognition of your Self, so
that there is not this split perception in which some of your conscious
experience is yours and you, and the rest of it is not yours and is not
you.

The ego’s goal is for you to keep this separation, to keep this
artificial division in place in your mind, because that’s the one
thing that can keep you from remembering Who You Are. It’s the one
thing that can apparently successfully distract you from waking up. And
so it’s very important, it’s essential to become clear about
body, world, universe, and you.

We once said that the Holy Spirit is the ANSWER. He is the answer to
everything, because He knows what the answer to everything IS.

And once again, let’s not forget that the Holy Spirit is nothing
more than your right Mind.

The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an
endless number.

Well, what would be a real question? A real question would be something
that uncovers and undoes a misperception. The questions the ego asks
distracts you from asking such pertinent questions.

The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an
endless number. Yet YOU can learn this as you learn to question the
value of the ego…

… wow! There’s a good question: One that will tend to undo
the illusion or the misperception …

… YOU can learn this as you learn to question the value of the
ego, and thus establish your ability to evaluate its questions.

Now this is an example of the absurdity of an ego’s question:
“Where does your lap go when you stand up? What is the sound of
one hand clapping?”

They are questions that can’t be answered. But the ego asks them,
together with the suggestion that there is an answer, and that it would
be well for you to engage in finding it. It’s very much like the
children’s game where they send an unsuspecting buddy out on a
snipe hunt, knowing that there aren’t any snipes, you see, and
taking advantage of the buddy’s ignorance. It’s a …
so we’re talking about learning to distinguish answerable and
unanswerable questions, evaluating the ego’s questions, so that
you can recognize that going for that answer is going to be futile and
will not uncover anything that will displace a misperception.

When the ego tempts you to sickness, do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal
the BODY, for this would merely be to accept the ego’s belief that
the body is the proper aim for healing.

See [small laugh], when the ego tempts you to sickness. You see, the
proper place to give your attention is the undoing of the
temptation—the recognition that you’re being
tempted—so that you may turn your back on the tempter, and say,
“Get thee behind me. Get out of my sight. I do not choose to
embrace you and give any part of my attention to you.” You see?

When the ego tempts you to sickness, do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal
the BODY, for this would merely be to accept the ego’s belief that
the body is the proper aim for healing. Ask, rather, that the Holy
Spirit teach you the right PERCEPTION of the body, for perception alone
can be distorted. ONLY perception can be sick, because only perception
can be WRONG.

Now, there’s an important point in here.

Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the right PERCEPTION of the
body…

It doesn’t say ask the Holy Spirit to help you see that the body
isn’t real, or that it doesn’t exist. You ask for the right
perception of the body, because something is going on there That Is
Real, and you want the right perception.

This next sentence is very important.

Wrong perception is DISTORTED WILLING…

… it’s a distorted use of will.

Wrong perception is DISTORTED WILLING, which wants things to be as they
are not.

The ego would say, “Your body is acting up. Your body is at odds
with you. Correction of your body needs to occur. You need medication.
You need to coerce it, one way or another, into better, more harmonious
behavior. Understanding, of course, that it’s not really you. And
it’s only a temporary abode. And therefore, doesn’t really
care about you, doesn’t have your best interests at heart. So you
need to coerce this that is perfectly willing to function at odds with
you and not in your best interest. You need to finesse this enemy into
better behavior.” And all the time that this dialogue is going on,
you are being tempted not to give your attention to the tempter and
still his voice by withdrawing your attention from it.

Your body cannot be at odds with you. It cannot be your enemy, your
opponent, because it’s sole Function is to Identify the Presence
of your Individuality perfectly. It is nothing less than your total
ally. But the ego says that it is something that it is not, and wants
you to deal with it on that basis.

Now …

The REALITY of everything is totally harmless, because total
harmlessness is the CONDITION of its reality.

The Reality of your body is totally harmless, because total harmlessness
is the condition of its Reality. The Father moved. The Father moves and
the Movement looks like you. What do you mean, “looks like
you”? Looks like you. Is experienceable as you. And because the
Movement of God was harmless, the Visibility and Tangibility, the
Experienceability of you, is harmless. Not only that, it is also
harmlessness.

It is also the condition of your AWARENESS of its reality.

In other words, you don’t really have a mind that is capable of
being successfully split, and therefore conflicted; that actually has
the capacity to look at something and see something that isn’t
there; see something different from What’s Really There.

It’s important here, not only is the Course bringing your
attention to the fact that every Aspect of Creation is harmless, in
spite of the apparent danger that you can see in it; your Mind is also
harmless—not truly capable of creating a conflicted world to see.
It may distort your perception, but it can’t make God’s
Creation actually be harmful. Your capacity to see the Kingdom of Heaven
is intact. That’s the point. Your capacity to see Reality As It Is
speaks to the harmlessness of your Mind. The fact that no matter how
conflicted you seem to experience it, that is not its true state. That
is an illusion as well.

Do you see that what it’s saying here, the Reality of everything
observed—I’m inserting that word—the Reality of
everything observed is totally harmless, because total harmlessness is
the condition of Its Reality. It is also the condition of the observer
of Its Reality. You see now? Harmlessness is the nature of the observed
and the observer. So don’t be too proud of yourself if you are one
of those who can quickly and easily recognize something is wrong. Got
it?

If you are going to fly in the face of the ego’s suggestion that
you do indeed live in a hostile and harmful environment, you are also
going to have to challenge the idea that you actually … actually
have a capacity to recognize danger, a capacity to see evil. Because if
you want healing, you’ve got to recognize the benign-ness of that
which needs to be healed, together with the benign-ness of your Mind in
the act of observing the thing that needs healing. That is the only way
you bring Singularity into the picture. And Singularity is the only
thing that causes instantaneous transformation of illusion into the
Conscious Experience of Reality that’s called healing.

How on earth could you stand making a Gift of acknowledging the Truth of
what you’re seeing, if you hold out for the right to not only see
Truth, but error as well? If your mind is split, you’re going to
give the gift of a split mind. And so you’ll say,
“There’s a real something going on here called cancer, but I
know that cancer isn’t real. I know that cancer isn’t
ordained by God. And so I am going to give my attention to acknowledging
what has to be the Truth right there. And I am going to thereby
invalidate the seeming evidence of a lie there, of something
untrue.” But if you don’t do that and then, as well, correct
the idea in your mind that you, because of your spiritual advancement,
are able to see the difference between a real problem and the Truth, and
that’s what gives you power to heal. You’ve got to get past
that, because you don’t actually have a Mind capable of seeing an
illusion needing to be corrected.

And as long as you claim that capacity to be able to clearly see Truth
and error—“real error” that the Truth can
destroy—you haven’t moved into an unconflicted State of Mind
in which you are being the spontaneous, uncalculated Giver of the
recognition of Truth. You will not have moved into Singularity. If
you’re going to see the benign-ness, the harmlessness of the thing
you’re observing, you need to also claim the benign-ness of you as
the observer.

Continuing …

You do not have to seek reality. It will seek YOU and find you, when you
meet its conditions.

Now I’ve just talked about meeting its conditions. The conditions
are your willingness to acknowledge and embrace the fact that the Truth
Of You is that you are Pure Consciousness which is benign, because
it’s not divided. It’s not split up into a capacity to see
good and evil. And you have to be willing to embrace the fact that no
matter what out there seems to need to be healed, there still is only
one thing going on there, and that is God presencing Himself as
Creation, and that this Creation is, in spite of the way It is perceived
at the moment, utterly and awesomely Perfect.

When you bring the observed, and yourself as the observer, into that
kind of Singular alignment of Intent, your will becomes identical with
the Father’s, and there is only One Will present. And this
constitutes Singularity. In other words, don’t mess around with
the word “Singularity” and wonder what it means. It means
un-conflicted-ness, Pure Harmony, Pure Peace. When you are experiencing
Peace, Real Peace, there’s no conflict. That’s Singularity.
Singularity is not some sort of universal not-quite-understandable
meaning. It’s an experience where nothing extraneous to It is
present, like Peace.

Reality will seek you and find you when you meet Its conditions.

Its conditions are part of what it IS. And this part only is up to you.
The rest is of Itself.

Truth reveals Itself the moment you are presenting nothing to block Its
presentation of Itself, and you get rid of the blocks to Its experience
by being the benign observer of a benign world. A benign observer and a
benign world that are benign because you aren’t a shitty little
ego, and you aren’t living in a shitty world, because God is All
That Is Going On, and you’re not separate from that Going-on-ness
of God.

Continuing …

You need do so little…

… so much less is called for from you than you think.

You need do so little, because It …

… Truth, Reality …

… is so powerful that your little part will bring the whole TO
you.

The moment you’re undefended against Reality, it will flood you.

Accept, then, your little part, and LET the whole be yours.

Yes. I know. Sounds so simple, and it can’t possibly be that
simple.

… LET the whole be yours.

How do you let the Whole be yours? See how quickly you forget. You let
the Whole be yours by not reinforcing the definitions of everything that
you’ve always been using. You let it in by getting up in the
morning saying, “I don’t know what anything means. I think I
know what it means. I thought I knew what it means. But I am willing to
make the assumption that I don’t know What Anything Really Means
because I’m quite positive I’m not awake yet. And therefore,
there is more here for me to see. And so today I am going to dedicate
myself to the best of my ability in every single situation to be looking
for the more of What Is Going On than what I’m seeing. I am going
to stop defending my confidences in what I think everything is.”

All you have to do is neglect to reinforce what you believe. You should
write that down. All you have to do is neglect to reinforce what you
believe. That is how you let the Whole be yours.

The minute you take down the dike, the minute you remove the wall,
what’s on the other side of the wall fills up the space, rushes
in, infills you. And what’s on the other side of the wall? The
Rest of You that’s been called the Holy Spirit. The Answer. That
which is the Answer because It knows all the Answers, because It is the
full Consciousness of Truth that is yours.

You all already know the answers. You’ve just been playing around
at, “What would it be like if I didn’t know all the
answers?” I’m going to play being ignorant for a while, and
see what the experience is like. And so, you block off All The Rest Of
You that Knows all the Answers. Take this little tiny piece of the
Infinity Of You and you say, “This is me. And only that which is
inside that small area is what I know. And so there’s so much that
I don’t know that it’s going to be a pure adventure to
discover it.” You see?

You do not have to seek reality. It will seek YOU and find you, when you
meet its conditions. Its conditions are part of what it IS. And this
part only is up to you. The rest is of Itself.

Reality.

You need do so little, because It is so powerful that your little part
will bring the whole TO you. Accept, then, your little part, and LET the
whole be yours.

Now …

Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. ALL forms of sickness, even
unto death, are physical expressions of …

… what? Surprise! Surprise!

… the FEAR OF AWAKENING.

Don’t shake your head.

As I’ve said before, you’re afraid of Waking, Awakening, for
a number of reasons; not the least of which is that you’re afraid
it’s going to be too much work. It’s going to require too
much of you, that you’re going to have to be too conscious, that
you’re going to have to be too alert. And being alert, because
it’s always been a part of defense for you, has not been something
you’ve been able to recognize as so absolutely natural to you that
you rest in alertness. That alertness, that Consciousness, is an
Experience of Peace. And so you push Awakening away from you for fear
that it will be so demanding of you that you would rather put up with,
tolerate, the dissonance of life that you’re experiencing because
it’s not so demanding.

Being Awake is absolutely UNdemanding, because a Mind that isn’t
experiencing disintegration is in a State of Perfect Peace. And Mind
moves infinitely in Perfect Peace, and work is a concept entirely
foreign to It. It is effortless. And your fear that it will be too
demanding keeps you from discovering and having the experience of
Effortless, Peaceful, Infinite, Conscious Awareness.

Again, all forms of sickness, even the one that seems most impossible to
deal with, death, are physical expressions of the fear of Awakening.

They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of …

… what?

… CONSCIOUSNESS.

Again, because you do not realize that the Experience of Consciousness
is an Experience of Rest. Creation, the Movement of Creation occurs in
the context of effortlessness. Therefore, rest.

This is a pathetic way of trying NOT to know by rendering the faculties
for knowing ineffectual. “Rest in peace” is a blessing for
the living, not the dead, because rest comes from WAKING, not from
sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is joining.

Making One.

Dreams are ILLUSIONS of joining…

… what? [laughing] The crazy dream of that you have woken up and
you’re getting ready for work, while you’re still sound
asleep in bed.

Dreams are ILLUSIONS of joining…

… dreams are illusions of doing anything. But dreams are
specifically illusions of joining…

… taking on the ego’s distortions about what joining means
if you are sleeping under its guidance.

Well, joining while you’re sleeping under the ego’s guidance
amounts to data gathering, constantly making moves against your
opponent. Maybe even making moves against your opponent that are so
close to being for your opponent that your opponent doesn’t
realize that you’re really seeing him as an antagonist. You see?

Dreams are ILLUSIONS of joining, taking on the ego’s distortions
about what joining means if you are sleeping under its guidance. Yet the
Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep, and can use dreams on behalf of
WAKING, if you will let Him.

In other words, the Holy Spirit can turn every single one of your dreams
to your advantage. How? By helping you to question what you’re
looking at so that you’re asking questions that help break
misperceptions. Misperceptions? Well, the only place misperceptions are
going on are in your dream, your current state of unconsciousness of
Truth. So the ego uses your misperceptions to keep you asleep. While the
Holy Spirit uses your misperceptions to help you wake up, by not
distracting you from questions, the answers to which will undo
misperceptions and release you from the bondage of your commitment to
them.

How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep.

And I’m going to say how you wake up is the sign of how you went
to sleep, as well. In other words, your Awakening, as I’ve said
before, is going to be you retracing the steps you took away from Home.
So the trip will be unique to each of you, because you all used
different reasons for arriving at the same place, and you will undo
those reasons, one by one, as you go back Home.

Again …

How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. To whom did you
give it? Under which teacher did you place it?

It doesn’t make sense. Let me ask it this way to help clarify [it]
for you. Who are you giving your dreams to now? Who are you giving your
sleep-time to now? Are you giving it to the Holy Spirit? To the best of
your ability, aren’t you taking your experience and turning it
over to the Holy Spirit and asking the Holy Spirit, “What’s
the Truth here?” So now you are giving your sleep experience and
your dreams to the Holy Spirit asking for clarification. But until you
did that, you were giving it to the other teacher. And, of course, the
other teacher kept telling you to push the snooze button. You see?
“Stay asleep a little bit longer. Stay asleep a little bit
longer.”

So …

How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. To whom did you
give it?

And I’m saying, “And to whom are you giving it now?”

And …

Under which teacher did you place it?

And I’m adding, “Under which teacher are you placing it
now?” You know. “Holy Spirit, here is my dream. Here’s
my sleepiness. Help me see the Truth.” Which teacher are you
giving it to now?

Whenever you wake dispiritedly, it was NOT of the Holy Spirit. ONLY when
you awaken joyously have you utilized sleep according to the Holy
Spirit’s purpose.

Now this can be used metaphorically, as well as actually, we’ll
say. When you go to sleep at night, do you turn your rest over to the
Holy Spirit? Or do you just say, “Wow! I’m a very tired
body. It’s been a rough day, and I know it’s going to be
rough tomorrow. And so I’m going to get to sleep as quickly as I
can so that my poor, tired, physical body can go through a process of
rejuvenation. And so that I can have a certain appropriate number of
dreams that cause my mind to come back into better balance. And I sure
hope I have that appropriate number of dreams because I know I need to
be able to be ready to deal with tomorrow.” You see? Is that the
way you’ve gone to sleep? Or have you turned it over to the Holy
Spirit?

But, likewise, in terms of truly waking up to the Conscious Experience
of What You Are and your Birthright, you must turn that over to the Holy
Spirit. And inevitably your Awakening, even if it seems to be in little
increments, will be invariably an Experience of Joy; not one of
dispiritedness.

Continuing …

You can indeed be “drugged by sleep,” but this is always
because you have MISUSED it on behalf of sickness.

And I’m going to say here, sickness in terms of a wish to have
things be what they are not. A wish to have things be what you’ve
defined them as, rather than asking the Father to disclose to you What
It Really Incredibly Is.

Continuing …

Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of
unconsciousness. UNCONSCIOUSNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE.

It’s impossible for you to become less than What You Divinely Are.
It’s impossible for you to become less than What God Is Being
right there where you are right now. It’s impossible! Because
it’s impossible, you haven’t accomplished it, even though
you believe your imaginations. And because you haven’t
accomplished it, you can wake up right now.

You can rest in peace only BECAUSE you are awake.

Because Creation moves in Peace. Creation moves effortlessly.

Healing is release from the fear of waking…

… “Help me, Father, to no longer be afraid of waking up.
Help me be willing to risk the chance that the experience of being Awake
will be an absence of personal demand on me to keep everything together,
and to keep my mind in such perfect order that nothing bad can happen to
me in an infinite world that I can’t be positively assured is
benign.” You see? “Help me see that that’s not what
I’m faced with. Help me risk the chance that if I abandon my
control, that if I abandon my need to be in charge, I will experience
being inseparable from the Movement of Creation, and that it will be an
experience of pure effortlessness, while being more Conscious than I
ever remember having been.” Let this be your prayer.

Healing is release from the fear of waking, and the substitution of the
WILL TO WAKE.

The will to wake. You see, it’s really simple. The will to wake
isn’t some sort of will you’ve got to screw up the courage
to express. The will to wake is simple. The will to wake is the will to
Love. That’s not foreign to you.

The will to wake is the will to love…

… and what is Love? It’s you using your body as a means of
communication in acknowledgement of That Which Is Real in each and every
thing.

Again …

The will to wake is the will to love, since ALL healing involves
replacing fear with love. The Holy Spirit …

… that which is nothing more than your right Mind.

… cannot distinguish among degrees of error, for if He taught
that one form of sickness is more serious than another, He would be
teaching that one error can be MORE REAL than another. His function
…

Your function.

… is to distinguish ONLY between the false and the true…

… what?

… REPLACING the false with the true.

You don’t just see it—the difference. You see it, and
because you see it, the false gets replaced by What Is True. What are
you doing when that happens? You’re allowing yourself to be the
benign observer of that which is observed as being benign. And
we’ve brought the Singularity into place where you’re
recognizing the harmlessness of your world together with the recognition
that you, the observer, are engaging in harmlessness by not seeing in a
conflicted manner.

The ego…

… on the other hand …

… which always WEAKENS the will, wants to SEPARATE the body from
the mind.

The observer from the observed.

This is an attempt to DESTROY it, yet the ego actually believes that it
is PROTECTING it. This is because the ego believes that MIND IS
DANGEROUS, and that to MAKE MINDLESS is to heal.

You could say to make unconscious is to heal. And, of course, for the
mind to become unconscious of the Truth secures the ego’s
existence. And that is healing from the ego’s vantage point,
because anything which undermines its existence is an enemy that it
needs to be healed of so it’s not present in its experience, and
there is no threat of its annihilation.

The ego sees True healing the way you see disease in your ignorant
state. Anything that will undermine it is an enemy, is a—what do
you call it?—a terminal disease, which it can’t afford to
catch. So healing of the potential of this terminal disease, for the
ego, would be for the terminal disease to disappear. And yet what is a
terminal disease for the ego is nothing more than, and nothing less
than, Truth—Reality. Because Reality will make it obvious that the
ego had no existence and was just imagined.

Continuing …

But to make mindless …

… or to make, to render unconscious …

… is impossible, since it would mean to make nothing out of what
God created.

As long as you are experiencing ignorance, and as long as you are
looking through the lens of ignorance at your world, and you’re
not experiencing It as What It Is, and you’re not experiencing
yourself as What You Are, isn’t this making nothing out of what
God created? Because why? There’s no Gift occurring. There’s
no body being used as a means to an end—that end being the
recognition and acknowledgement of the Presence of God in each and every
thing, as well as in yourself. You see? And so while you’re not
recognizing God, all of you are, in effect, making God nothing and
nowhere. It doesn’t make God disappear, but it does make your
experience like that.

Now, if you can’t make nothing out of God, then you haven’t
been made mindless. You haven’t been made incapable of recognizing
and acknowledging God. And so your capacity to do that is totally
intact. And you need to know that so that you can be curious to know how
to reinstate it as your Conscious Experience by asking, “Holy
Spirit, God, how do I renew my Birthright of being able to see Reality
as it is right now?” See, that’s one of those questions that
the ego will not direct you to ask. And it’s one of the questions
that will, when the answer is heard, undo misperception.

Continuing …

The ego DESPISES weakness, even though it makes every effort to INDUCE
it. The ego WANTS only what it hates. To the ego this is perfectly
sensible. Believing in the power of attack, the ego WANTS attack.

Why? Is anybody wondering why? Why? Because it thrives on the hit of
believing that it can succeed through attack in overcoming the
Consciousness of God that would remind you of Who You Are, so that it
(the ego) through your faith and commitment in it, may become enthroned
as the equal of God, because it has succeeded in causing you to forget
God. And that’s it in a nutshell.

It’s just an insanity. It’s … let’s put it this
way. It’s not a big problem. It’s just a misperception,
which is being held to so tightly that it seems to be insurmountable. It
seems as though it will be impossible to wake up, but it’s not.
It’s a little problem. It’s a little misperception. It
sounds terrible.

The ego DESPISES weakness…

… mm. Wonder where it got the substance to feel and despise
something. It didn’t.

The ego DESPISES weakness, even though it makes every effort to INDUCE
it. The ego WANTS only what it hates.

This could be quite an indictment on all of you, if you all accept the
idea that you are an ego. But you’re not—that you are, is a
little misperception.

Believing in the power of attack, the ego WANTS attack.

Sounds serious, doesn’t it? It’s just a little misperception
about what you are. There is no ego that has a capacity to desire
anything or want anything. The ego is an imaginative collection of
thoughts, draped around a Christ. That’s all. And if there’s
any impetus to anything, if there’s any will, if there’s any
feeling, if there’s any commitment, it’s borrowed from the
Christ around which this flimsy collection of ideas is draped. Because
you put on your ego garment for an impression, like the modern
1940’s toaster that will make your kitchen look so good. You see?

So just remember, you are the Christ right now wearing a garment that
you are tempted to believe and be committed to, but the garment is
nothing but a collection of spurious ideas that express no intelligence
whatsoever. But you are quite capable of believing unintelligent things.

The way out of this dilemma is the one we’ve been talking about,
and talking about, and talking about. Have an object of your affection.
Find anything, find as many things, find everything, if you can, in your
experience worthy of an inquisitiveness on your part, an inquisitiveness
to see the more That Is Real right there than what you’re seeing.
Because somewhere you heard that there’s a God, and that this God
is All in All, and that everything that is occurring is the Reality of
the Movement of Him, His Mind, including you.

And you want the clearer experience of you, as well as your world. You
want the clearer experience of what being the observer means, as well as
the clearer experience of what the observed is, so that there is
healing. You ask for that, so that in the influx of the inspiration of
Truth that comes because you asked for it, you will be ready to
spontaneously give the acknowledgement of that to that which you are
observing.

So, it boils down to the centuries old answer to the problems of human
existence—Love. And you all understand What Love Is. So, what
you’re being asked to give, in order to have the experience of
waking up, is something not foreign to you. And although we have
hundreds of page here yet to read, and even though every Sunday night I
can turn three pages into seventeen pages of text [audience amusement],
the answer is simple. And we will continue as long as we need to in
discovering the simplicity of it, so that you allow it to happen.

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